Philippa Gregory - The Boleyn Inheritance

I am lost for an answer. I never thought that she would ask me this question. But her stupidity is such that she does, sometimes, go straight to the most obvious. I turn my head as if I am looking over the cold meadows where the river, swollen with the recent rains, shines like a sword, a French sword.

“Because you asked me to help you,” I say. “I am your friend.”

“Did you help Anne Boleyn?”

“No!” I exclaim. “She would have no help of mine!”

“You were not her friend?”

“I was her sister-in-law.”

“Did she not like you?”

“I doubt she ever saw me from start to finish. She had no eyes for me.”

This does not halt her speculation, as I intended, but feeds it. I can almost hear the slow revolving of her thoughts.

“She didn’t like you?” Katherine asks. “She and her husband and her sister, they were always together. But they left you out.”

I laugh, but it doesn’t come out well. “You make it sound like children in the school yard.”

She nods. “That is just how it is in a royal court. And did you hate them for not letting you join them?”

“I was a Boleyn,” I say. “I was a Boleyn as much as they. I was a Boleyn by marriage; their uncle the duke is my uncle. My interests are in the family as theirs were.”

“So why did you give evidence against them?” she asks.

I am so shocked at her directly accusing me, I can hardly speak. I look at her. “Where did you hear of this? Why would you speak of this?”

“Catherine Carey told me,” she says, as if it is unremarkable that the two girls, all but children, should share confidences about treason and incest and death. “She said that you bore witness against your husband and his sister. You gave evidence to show that they were lovers and traitors.”

“I did not,” I whisper. “I did not.” I cannot bear her naming this; I never think of it. I will not think of it today. “It wasn’t like that,” I say. “You don’t understand because you are only a girl. You were a child when all this happened. I tried to save him; I tried to save her. It was a great plan of your uncle’s devising. It failed, but it should have succeeded. I thought that I would save him if I gave evidence, but it all went wrong.”

“Is that how it was?”

“It was heartbreaking!” I cry out in my pain. “I tried to save him, I loved him, I would have done anything for him.”

Her pretty young face is filled with sympathy. “You meant to save him?”

I dash the tears from my eyes with the back of my glove. “I would have died for him,” I say. “I thought I would save him. I was going to save him. I would have done anything to save him.”

“Why did it go wrong?” she whispers.

“Your uncle and I thought that if they pleaded guilty, she would be divorced and would be sent away, to a convent. We thought that he would be stripped of his title and his honors and banished. The men who were named with her were never guilty; everyone knew that. They were George’s friends and her courtiers, not lovers. We thought they would all be forgiven, as Thomas Wyatt was forgiven.”

“So what happened?”

It is like a dream, this retelling. It is the dream that comes to me often, that wakes me in the night like sickness, that sends me from my bed to walk and walk in the dark room until the first gray light comes into the sky and I know my ordeal is over.

“They denied their guilt. That was not part of the plan. They should have confessed, but they denied everything except saying some words against the king. George had said that the king was impotent.” Even on this bright autumn day, five years after the trial, I still lower my voice and glance around me to make sure that no one can hear. “Their courage failed them, they denied their guilt and did not ask for mercy. I stayed with the plan, as your uncle said I should. I saved the title, I saved the lands, I saved the Boleyn inheritance, I saved their fortune.”

Katherine is waiting for more. She does not understand that this is the end of the story. This is my great act and my triumph: I saved the title and the lands. She even looks puzzled.

“I did what I had to do to save the Boleyn inheritance,” I repeat. “My father-in-law, George and Anne’s father, had built a fortune over his lifetime. George had added to it. Anne’s wealth had gone into it. I saved it. I saved Rochford Hall for us; I kept the title. I am Lady Rochford still.”

“You saved the inheritance, but they didn’t inherit it,” Katherine says, uncomprehending. “Your husband died, and he must have thought you were giving evidence against him. He must have thought that while he was pleading not guilty, you were accusing him. You were a witness for his prosecution.” Slowly she thinks, slowly she speaks, slowly she says the worst thing of all. “He must have thought that you let him go to his death so that you could keep the title and the lands, even though you had killed him.”

I could scream at her for saying this, for putting words to this nightmare. I rub my face with the back of my glove as if I would scrub my scowl away. “No. Not so! Not so! He won’t have thought that,” I say desperately. “He knew that I loved him, that I was trying to save him. As he went to his death, he would have known that I was on my knees before the king, asking him to spare my husband. When she went to her death, she will have known that at the very last moment I was before the king, asking him to spare her.”

She nods. “Well, I hope you never bear witness to save me,” she says. It is a miserable attempt at humor; I do not even accord it a smile.

“It was the end of my life,” I say simply. “It was not just the end of their lives, it was death to me, too.”

We ride in silence for a while, and then two or three of Katherine’s friends kick their horses forward to ride beside her and chatter to her about Ampthill and the greeting we are certain to have, and whether Katherine has finished with her yellow gown and will give it to Katherine Tylney. In a moment there is a quarrel breaking out because Katherine had promised it to Joan, but Margaret is insisting that it should go to her.

“You can both hold your peace,” I rule, dragging myself back to the present moment. “For the queen has worn that gown not more than three times, and it will stay in her wardrobe until she has had more use out of it.”

“I don’t care,” Katherine says. “I can always order another.”

At church I enter, cross myself, curtsy to the altar, and take my place in my high-walled pew. Thank God that no one can see me in here; the high door closes behind me, the walls guarantee my privacy, and even the front of the pew is paneled with a lattice so I can see but not be observed. Only the priest, if he is standing high up in the choir stalls, can look down on me. If I glance away from the Host, or fail to cross myself at the right time, or use the wrong hand, or do it the wrong way round, I will not be reported for heresy. There are thousands in this country who now guard their every movement because they do not have my privacy. There are hundreds who will die because they got it wrong.

I stand, and bow, and kneel, and sit, as I am bidden by the order of the service; but I can take little pleasure today from the liturgy. This is the king’s order of service, and in every rolling phrase I hear the power of Henry, not the power of God. In the past I have known God in many places; in small Lutheran chapels at home, in the great soaring majesty of Saint Paul’s in London, and in the quiet of the royal chapel at Hampton Court when I once knelt beside the Princess Mary and felt the peace of heaven descend around us; but it seems that the king has soured his church for me and for so many others. I find God now in silence: when I walk in the park or beside the river, when I hear a blackbird calling at midday, when I see a flight of geese arrowing overhead, when the falconer releases a bird and I see her mount up high and soar. God no longer speaks to me when Henry allows it, in the words that Henry prefers. I am in hiding from the king, and I am deaf to his God.

We are on our knees praying for the health and safety of the royal family when to my surprise there is a new prayer inserted without warning into the familiar words. Without a flicker of shame, the priest bids my court, my ladies, and myself to give thanks for the king’s wife Katherine.

“We render thanks to thee, oh Lord, that after so many strange accidents that have befallen the king’s marriages, that thou hast been pleased to give him a wife so entirely conformed to his inclinations as her, he now has.”

I cannot help myself, my head bobs up from reverent submission and I meet the surprised gaze of the Richmond priest in the choir stalls. He is reading the celebration of the king’s wife from an official document, he has been ordered to read this as he might be ordered to read a new law. Henry, in his madness, has commanded every church in England to thank God that after the many “strange accidents” of his previous marriages, he now has a wife who conforms to his inclinations. I am so outraged by the language of this, by the sentiment of it, and by the fact that I have to be on my knees listening to this insult, that I half rise to my feet in protest.

At once an insistent hand grabs the back of my gown and pulls me down; I stumble for a moment and fall back to my knees again. Lotte, my translator, gives me a small smile, puts her hands together in a portrait of devotion, and closes her eyes. Her gesture steadies me. This is indeed an insult, most gross and thoughtless; but to respond to it is to charge into danger. If the king requires me to go on my knees and describe myself to the kingdom as a strange accident, then it is not for me to point out that our marriage was no accident but a well-planned and thoughtfully considered contract that he broke for the simple and sufficient reason that he preferred someone else. It is not my place to point out that since our marriage was real and valid, he is now either an adulterer or a bigamist, living in sin with a second wife. It is not my place to point out that if little Kitty Howard, a lighthearted, light-mannered child, is the only woman he has ever found who conforms to his inclinations, then either she must be the greatest actor who ever lived, or he must be the most deluded fool who ever married a girl young enough to be his own daughter.

Henry is a madman now, doting on a girl like a senile fool, and he has just ordered the whole of his country to thank God for his folly. In churches up and down the land people will be biting their lips to contain their smiles; honest men will be cursing the luck that puts them in Henry’s church with this nonsense included in their prayers. “Amen,” I say loudly, and when we rise to our feet for the blessing, I show the priest a serene and devout face. My only thought, as we leave the church, is that poor Princess Mary at Hunsden will be choking with indignation at the insult to her mother, at the blasphemy of having to pray for Kitty Howard, and the idiocy of her father. Please God she has the sense to say nothing. It seems whatever the king likes to do, we must all say nothing.

On Tuesday, one of my ladies gazing out of the window remarks: “Here is the ambassador, running up the garden from a riverboat. What can have happened?”

I rise to my feet. Dr. Harst never visits me without first sending notice that he is coming. Something must have happened at court. My first thought is for Elizabeth or Mary; my first fear is that something has happened to them. If only Mary has not been driven by her father to defy him! “Stay here,” I say shortly to my women, and I throw a shawl around my shoulders and go down to greet him.

He is entering the hall as I come down the stairs and at once I know that something serious has happened.

“What is it?” I ask him in German.

He shakes his head at me, and I have to wait until the servants have come, served him with wine and biscuits, and I can send them all from the room. “What is it?”

“I came at once, without the full story, because I want you to be forewarned,” he says.

“Forewarned of what? It is not the Princess Mary?”

“No. It is the queen.”

“She is with child?”

He shakes his head. “I don’t know exactly. But she has been confined to her chambers since yesterday. And the king will not see her.”

“She is ill? He is terrified of taking the plague.”

“No. There are no physicians called.”

“She is not accused of plotting against him?” I name the greatest fear.

“I will tell you all I know, and it is mostly gathered from the servant we have in the king’s rooms. The king and queen attended Mass on the Sunday, and the priest gave thanks for the king’s marriage, as you know.”